I noticed a significant focus on China with the latest OS updates. With China at 1.34 billion that’s a huge market to capture. I’m going to predict that Apple will be making a major push into that market. Expect Apple to sell more devices in the Chinese market in the next few years than the rest of the world. If your company is doing most of it’s business in China then why not open offices there with native Chinese developers to create the apps needed for that market?

Next is a minor thing but the Siri focus on Baseball seems a little out of pace with the the focus on a world wide market like China. Perhaps because baseball has such a rich set of statistics it makes sense to leverage that. But the biggest sport in the world is Soccer and if Apple is moving to more of a “world” focus with it’s products then they can’t ignore Soccer and for that matter Formula One. However there are financial demographics to consider too. But if that’s the case F1 is the richest set of enthusiasts there are and Soccer simply has numbers of fans. If you think you can sell iPhones to 20¢ an hour Chinese then why not world soccer fans?

Facebook integration seems like a late starter as a major thing to add to your OS. It seems very much like something that will feel like legacy baggage in about a year. But I guess because Google has gone their own way and ignored Apple and Apple has declared war on Android then that really only leaves Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter integration seems more appropriate but Google integration would be better. At this point because of the bad relations between the two companies it’ll be up to Google to make its apps work well with Apple products. So far, in my opinion, their efforts suck even when 3rd parties want to play.

iOS seems to be getting an education focus with better controls for letting kids use iPads without worrying that the kids will play games or go surfing the web. Good Job. Now if they can fix the broken App purchasing model for institutions then we’ll be good. The Volume Purchasing Program for iOS works fine if you need lots of something but not if you need a couple of things here or there. It doesn’t even exist for OS X!

Passbook should be good. That takes a different route than the near field communication systems that use RFID tags and all the security issues there. Possibly another industry changing system. We will wait to see for sure.

The new Maps app just points out the growing riff between Apple and Google. It looks like a good app but I’m not sure Apple can do it any better than Google. Maybe they can or at least keep up. Time will tell. With this kind of competition between these two companies it spells doom, or at least niche market status, for anyone else in the GPS map hardware business. Sell your stock in Garmin now!